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Progress In Brain-Based Lie Detection
A Cognitive Neuroscientist writes "A new study, led by Harvard Psychologist Joshua Greene and forthcoming in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may represent progress on the front of using brain imaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, to detect lies. According to Harvard's press release, Greene's is 'the first study to examine brain activity of people telling actual lies,' as opposed to prior studies in which subjects were merely instructed to lie. The results suggest that one key step in distinguishing honest from dishonest individuals may involve focusing on a small set of brain regions that are responsible for executive control and attention. However, given that the actual paper is yet to be published, it's unclear whether the study is prone to some of the methodological and interpretive complications that have recently plagued similar brain imaging studies."
Back to savage beatings and waterboarding, I guess.
I don't understand why the contributor of this story is so skeptical of it...it seems all we would need to do is hook the scientists up to an fMRI and we'd know for sure if they were lying about the study!
I understand that it takes significant testing to confirm that the machines are working correctly for each individual. I would bet that many individuals - such as psychopaths - could easily beat the machine if they refused to cooperate/pretened to cooperate with the 'set-up' phase.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I wonder how well this method would work if tested on the researchers regarding the validity of their results...
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
...to find out the location of the Hidden Rebel Base.
Ok, Ok, Once in a while she comes across someone like Princess Azula who could lie without setting off tremors, but still I would rather Ang depend on Toff than on some mechanism that requires the test subjects strapped to gurney and wheeled in. I mean, I know Appa is big and powerful and carry lots of load but lugging around an MRI machine? Come on gimme a break.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Let's pretend we had a non-invasive, 100% reliable method of detecting lies. Assume that it is proven to the point where no one argues that it has failures.
Would it be ethical to use them to prove innocence or guilt in a court of law?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I hear it works much better than the old rectal lie detectors from the 1970s, and light years beyond the foot based scanners from the 50s. At least they are moving in the right direction, although Wonder Woman's magic rope is still the standard to beat.
Maybe the guys who make Brain Age for the Nintendo DS can write the software interface.
If it works and people know it works, then it will dramaticaly chane the legal situation, even if it is not admissible in court. Pretty soon, every really innocent person would insist on providing testimony via it to prove their innocence, even if it was just to the police officer investigating. Then the police (and juries) would begin to shift their beliefs to "If the police charged him, then he must be guilty because if he was innocent he would volunteer for the test and the police would not be trying him."
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
apparently, they tested it on Tucker Max while he was telling one of his "totally true" stories.
The results of an MRI scan are composite images of increasing spatial resolution taken over a time span of minutes to tens of minutes. If a person's "liar region" of the brain lit up during a scan, that only means that region was active at some point during the scan, which could have occurred for any number of reasons during that time span.
MRI cannot be used as the sole means of evidence for this kind of study, and papers that rely solely on MRI are seen as untrustworthy or "merely-interesting" at best.
If the Mythbusters team can beat it (as Grant did in Episode 93) then who can't?
Truth and lies are simply a matter of acceptance and denial. Our perceptions of right and wrong are merely an assimilation of experiences in life. What is a lie for some is truth for others. Some people have mastered the notion of changing lies into truth and truth into lies in public, in private and even in their own hearts and minds.
Defeating such testing may well be as trivial as defeating traditional polygraph tests as they both rely on the same principle -- metabolic and other reactions in the body to the conflicts that reside in the brain when the logical loops result from the mix of truth and lie. I know that lawyers are especially skilful at transforming or even abandoning their own personal beliefs and convictions in order to serve the needs and interests of their clients. This is an art that can be learned by anyone with the patience to learn.
Actually, I lied.
Its not like "lieing" is a single category. There are many types of lies a person can tell, and many ways to lie.
I always thought there was something inherently flawed about asking people to lie. If I ask you to lie, you really can't. If I say "lie about your age", you can't, I never asked you to tell your age, I asked you to tell a fake age.
Thats far different from "did you kill her?" "Describe the event of finding her body and what you did next". In that case, well you really have something to hide, you have good reason to remember things, and good reason to not tell what you remembered.
You might have gone over it, looked for plausible changes to make to the story, things that can fit in but maybe can't be proven one way or another etc. Its more complicated and, I doubt that everyone does it the same way. I have long felt, mostly from listening to the statements made by people who claim to be able to tell when a person is lieing.
There are so many levels here. People making things up on the spot, I would imagine, do it very differently from someome who is deliberate and has had time to think, time to go over his new version of events. I have played with this myself in a few situations (usually things that are just personal details that I don't want to reveal or talk about, or can't due to a promised confidence).
Drawing on a friend of mines recent experience of being told by a police officer "I know your lieing because when you tell me about X and Y you look me right in the eye, but when you say Z, you look away", which isn't far off from skills useful in poker really.
Essentially, if you can teach yourself a story thats very close to reality but with a few tweaks, and learn it well enough that you can recall the story as a story and not as a lie where you have to improvise, its not too hard to do it looking someone right in the eye, and be easily believed.
Thats very different from nervous, on the fly lies.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The problems that have been noted have not just "recently plagued similar brain imaging studies", they have been around since the 'boxcar' stimulus method and SPM analysis technique were applied to MRI research.
There are enough that know better now that fMRI can be rightly questioned. But here you run into the problem of science vs. scientists. There are so many of the latter that have attached their name to previously accepted research that they'd refuse to accept any reports of problems. For example, there was recently an fMRI article published by PNAS. That means there are enough highly placed reviewers and associates of theirs in the National Academy that didn't know there was a problem and so aren't likely to come forward and admit their previous ignorance. Any trying to do so unilaterally would face opposition more strenuous than merely scientific. Hell, I learned the technique as well as the underlying theories from a student of the guy who invented them, and I still have my theory based objections countered with mention of how many publications use the technique vs. how many publications cover these "problems".
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Now your wife won't just suspect what you've been thinking about her younger sister. She'll know it for sure.
i would like to disprove it. i once had great fun with an american police officer demonstrating a lie detector to European police, who said a lie detector could not be manipulated. i proved him wrong, all the lies i told were registered as the truth. i would have killed 1million people, and I've slept with 5000 women, and i visited mars once or twice. i had great fun shattering someone's believe, and so did everyone surrounding it. i think i could even fool this :D
The truth is apparently easier for a person to relate than a lie is. This makes sense because obtaining the truth is just a matter of data retrieval and access.
The lie also involves data retrieval and access--only lots more of it, because the liar has to anticipate different narratives (I'm reading Anathem, so sorry.). The lie also involves a lot more plain processing.
The truth display process can also be readily completed. The liar can never be sure if his lie is adequately developed, so its resolution is a more open-ended procedure.
All this extra stuff takes work (in the sense of energy). That excessive energy use ought to be detectable, if one knows how and where to look.
Psychopaths still have to do all the work to lie, it's just that lying to them is like ordinary conversation to non-psychopaths. All the extra processing ought to be detectable--if you do the MRI in addition to the standard lie detector, the psychopath ought to stand out as a mountain of absurdity--his brain is processing like mad but all his other systems are flat normal.
This, of course, is speculation.
On the other hand, this shit really sucks because lying is the only real defense against totalitarian oppression. No doubt US companies will be selling these devices to China and North Korea like crazy.
In the U.S., such procedures will probably only get employed by consent, or with a warrant.
If the general scientific community comes to the conclusion that this kind of stuff is reliable, then it gets admitted into court. The lie detector can't pass this evidentiary test so it doesn't get admitted into court unless everybody agrees. There will be big battles over this kind of evidence because it is potentially a game-changer.
Wait till you can project images out of people's minds!!!
"Remember: it's not a lie... if you believe in it."
No. The body of law was constructed under the knowledge that it is not possible to verify your actions to 100% certainty. Think punitive deterrents etc. When the laws were written there was an implicit expectation of leeway guaranteed by the uncertainty of events. Not to mention that people are entirely capable of creating delusional fantasies that have replaced reality to the point that even if they thought they were lying( or telling the truth) that is still insufficient to prove that events occurred as reported.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
Until recently computerized, fingerprinting did not have rigorous scientific studies we demand of newer methods like DNA and brain patterns. When a fingerprint expert witness got up said there "9 points of mathcing" or twenty or whatever, there wasnt the research and analysis to say that really meant anything. It wasnt until computerized matching was implemented on a large scale that some rigor was introduced. This more on a ad-hoc basis rather scientifically proven.
If I doubt the truth of something I say (such as repeating a dubious factoid from another source), but am not lying -- how would that show up on such a test??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Even if this were proved to be accurate, would it be legally admissible? If you unlawfully took evidence from someone's residence, it would cause a mistrial... How could you justify taking information from inside someone's head without their consent to use against them in court?
Sometimes, 'because we can' isn't a good reason without seriously considering the long term ramifications.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I agree.. You may run over a dog with your car and not know it.. you would be telling the truth as you know it when you say "I did not run over any dog".. And having dealt with mentally ill people, I can tell you that relying on what they believe to be true would be a huge mistake.. I also spent 3 years arguing with an ex girlfriend over whether or not I stared at a magazine in a gas station (she would not let it go).. I'm sure we would both pass a lie detection test.
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